her home.

Let sights and sounds of earth be all forgot,
Her cares and tears
She hath endured thro' her allotted years,
Now they can touch her not.

From that fierce light which beats upon a throne
Now has she passed
Into God's stillness, cool and deep and vast,
Let Heaven for earth atone.

All gifts but one He gave, but kept the best
Till now in store;
Now He doth add to all He gave before
His perfect gift of rest." [1]

But, just as in the sunset a beautiful and tender after-glow remains
long after the sun has set, so we are gathered to-day in the tender
after-glow. And I propose that we should try and gather up one by
one--to learn ourselves and to tell our children, and the generations
yet unborn, as some explanation of the marvellous influence which she
exercised--some of the qualities of the Queen whom we have lost.

And let us first fix our minds upon something which at first sight
seems so simple, but yet seems to have struck every generation of
statesmen as a thing almost supernatural--and that is _her marvellous
truthfulness_. Said a great statesman, "She is the most perfectly
truthful being I have ever met." "Perfect sincerity" is the
description of another. Now what that must have meant to England, for
generation after generation of statesmen to have had at the centre of
the empire a truthful person, a person who never used intrigue, who
never was plotting or planning, or working behind the backs of those
who were responsible to advise her--to have had someone perfectly
sincere to deal with in the great things of state--that is something
which must be left for the historian who chronicles the Victorian era
thoroughly to paint. No, my friends, our task now is far simpler: it
is to ask what is the secret of this marvellous truthfulness, can we
obtain it ourselves, and does God demand it?

Let us take the last question first, and we take it first because it is
the question directly answered in our text. The answer is given by
someone who understood human nature, by someone who had sinned, had
been forgiven, had been roused out of the conventionalities of life by
a great experience, who had looked out of the door of his being and had
seen God. And he tells us, as the result of his experience, and as the
basis of his repentance, these words "Behold, Thou requirest truth in
the inward parts." It is one thing to say words which, understood in a
certain sense, a